Working in a very large urban high school provides a teacher with a tremendous amount of material for professional reflection. This past week was my first with the students at this new school. After 11 years at my previous school in East Calgary, I have moved to another high school, in west Calgary. This however is not the focus of this blog. I want to reflect on a couple of professional learning opportunities that occured this week, my return to coaching and the harshness of the tryout cutting process.
While I was already excited to be returning to coaching volleyball after spending the last four seasons focusing on my own young children, the victory by Canada's Men's team over The United States at this summers Rio Olympics had stoked the fire even more. Coaching the Junior Boys' Team at my new school is an exciting challenge. In the course of the three days of tryouts this week, 15 grade 10 and 11 boys took a great risk and showed up to tryout for a team. The impact of having to cut these boys to their face has impacted me in a far greater way than I had expected.
I had cut volleyball players before. But this is the first time that as a coach I had made the choice to talk to them face to face. On previous teams, my practice had been to post a list of successful players. This practice has served coaches well for many years, but in the interest of school-athletics being a curricular enterprise, as teaching practice has changed, coaching practice must also change. During tryouts, practices and games, coaches are particularly adept at providing student athletes with formative feedback. However, the cutting process, limiting your team to the select number of players has and likely always will be a harsh summative procedure. Interestingly all this was triggered by a comment from one of the grade 11 student-athletes who informed me that the Senior Boys' coach used this procedure on her newly selected team. Having just gone through this process this student-athlete must have thought enough of the endeavour to mention it to me. For these two reasons, I decided to sit down face to face with each of the young men and explain 4 things;
1. Whether or not they made the team.
2. My assessment of what they did well and where they need to improve as volleyball players.
3. Encourage them to show the same attitude and willingness to try new things in the rest of their high school career (and life for that matter).
4. Finally I thanked them for trying out.
In the end, though emotionally draining for me as an individual I think that each of the student-athletes appreciated both the opportunity to understand how they can improve as volleyball players, and my encouragement. All this said, cutting teams is by definition an exclusive endeavour. On some teams, rugby and soe football come to mind, all who tryout at least allowed to continue practicing. The ultimate summative assessment on these teams is playing time in games, yet another aspect of coaching that requires formative assessment in order to make summative decisions.
I'm looking forward to the upcoming season, and would love to hear your opinions, on any of these topics.
